The Last Perfect Summer
by ilurandir
Summary: Severus's first memory is the pub...


There are opinions and situations in this story involving British and/or Irish attitudes towards one another, as well as mentions of the IRA and Irish patriotism and rebellion in England  
Please remember that this fic takes place between 1964 and 1976 and that the opinions in this fic are not necessarily the opinions of the author.

Work Text:

Severus's earliest memory is the pub. He remembers the heat of it, the steam rising from the men's clothes, the close press of bodies; and outside the rain pounding down around Spinner's End as though the Mill town has done some terrible wrong to it. Perhaps it was because of the pollution of the river.

His father was at the font of the pub - Severus heard his voice before he saw him, because Severus, at three, maybe four, could only barely see round the legs of the men in front of him.

He was singing Ooh Ah Up the 'RA, but it wasn't for fucking football, not this time round. They didn't have a television. Tobias didn't watch football. He was only twenty-two and tonight, he was drunk and wild, and was singing rebel songs in a badly-lit pub. Tobias didn't learn. Tobias caused trouble. Tobias was grinning like a madman, oblivious to the rising tension around him.

But Seveurs could feel it - could feel it like magic - that strange tingling tension, but darker now, much darker. And excitement too.

Eileen was standing behind him, all drenched dark hair and tired dark eyes. It was the first time he remembered her taking him to the pub, 'round one or two in the morning, but he knew it had happened before. And that it would happen again.

"Go get your father," she said in his ear, and her skirt rustled as she stood and gave him a gentle push on the shoulder towards the front of the room.

Severus wound and pushed his way past the men's legs, and tables and chairs, squeezed between two shouting men at the front - their voices sounded like his father's - Irish lilt and their laughter was loud and raucous. They were jostled together by someone, a much younger man who shoved them with fire in his eyes

"Watch it!" One of them snarled, but he remembered, "A kid," and the voices near him quieted a little, though the pub didn't.

He was at the very front of the pub now. He didn't see the bartender spot him and come round the bar. He only had eyes for his father, young and pale and all lank and limbs. Still singing, he held his arms out, and Severus ran to him. Tobias swung him round to sit on his shoulders and Eileen, in a panic - because she too could sense the room's vibe - pushed her way to the front. Yes, there were men in this pub who were singing along, but there were men, too, in this pub who were eyeing her husband with sneers on their faces and no regard to her little boy.

His father was unsteady and Severus clutched at his dark hair with small hands - almost jaw-length, flopping into his eyes. His small hands touched the sides of his father's face. Tobias finally swung him free of his shoulders and set him down on the table. Even standing on it, Severus wasn't near as tall as his father.

_Tiocfaidh ár lá_. Severus knew those words and he said them along with his father now - they were burned into his mind. He never learned Irish - he never would, but there were words, phrases: Éire, mac, Éirinn go brách, the months of the year, how to count to ten, although he _always_forgot five.

He'd heard these songs before. He'd heard these words, he'd heard his father's empassioned speeches.

Tobias stilled when he saw Eileen - only a moment. He left Severus there, standing on the table - reaching out to him, his eyes dark, full of concern. His father had forgotten him before - he remembered it then, but not anymore - now he just remembered the fear of abandonment.

He finished the song - no one had moved. Eileen swept forward with her head down and scooped Severus up, holding him on her hip. "If you don't come straight home, you can sleep outside," she hissed to Tobias as she passed and a few men jeered.

Eileen and Severus walked home, hand in hand. Behind them, well behind them, Tobias followed.

There were no fights that night.

"They look at him funny, Eileen. Don't tell me you haven't noticed."

"They look at you funny, too, Tobias. Don't tell me _you_ haven't noticed."

Tobias leaned over his tea in the kitchen and Eileen looked on. "We're never that perfect family," she said, finally, setting her chipped mug in the sink and leaving the room.

Severus accidentally met his father's eyes across the table.

"I don't care how they look at me."

"Y'will."

But he was too little to know, really, at six, whether they looked at him because he was strange, or because his father sang Irish songs in British pubs, or because his mother had a child much too soon after her wedding day.

It didn't matter. It was July, he was eight, and he met Lily. And it was Lily, Lily, Lily after that.

"Where do you keep going everyday?" Eileen caught him one morning before Severus bolted out of the house.

He hesitated in the hallway, brushing his hair out of his face. "To meet someone…" he said, finally.

"Who?" Eileen asked. She was stitting on the couch, her mug of tea forgotten and a large tome on the battered coffee table in front of her. Tobias was at work. She wouldn't have dared otherwise.

"A friend."

Eileen raised her chin.

Severus held her eyes. He'd never had a friend before - he wasn't sure how to go about any of this. "Em…"

"I'd like to meet them."

Severus had seen Lily's house, with it's indoor lav and it's spacious rooms, and all that light coming in. Grass in the back garden instead of tarmac.

He didn't want to bring her to his, but he did in the end.

Eileen regarded her cooly, and to Severus it seemed that Lily was much too bright in their dingy house with her vivid red hair and her white and yellow sundress.

He stood, anxious and uncertain in the middle of their tiny sitting room while Lily introduced herself - all professionalism and manners. Then "Oh!" she said, all breathless and soft, excitement bubbling under the surface as her eyes fell to...

"Is this a book on magic?"

Eileen's hand came down protectively over the pages, covering a long list of ingredients and eyes shot to Severus and she raised her eyebrows. He nodded. _Yes… she's special too._

Suddenly Eileen smiled. Her strong hands smoothed the pages, and Lily dropped to her knees on the dirty wood floor, hanging onto his mother's every word.

She was always welcome after that. Just not when Tobias was home.

She disappeared to school come the fall. Severus had never gone. His mother and father and, on occasion, his great aunt Rosa, taught him everything he knew. Reading, writing, maths. He was a bright child (Thank Merlin) and learned quickly. Tobias fought homeschooling.

It takes time Eileen! (I've got nothing but, Tobias) and her husband, having left school himself, didn't have much of a say in it in the end. Just resented the fact that it was yet another brick in the wall separating them from the normality of the rest of Spinner's End.

The months where she left were agonizingly boring. The town would see him, wandering about like a lost ghost - an ill-dressed waif that rarely spoke and, when he noticed their stares, stared back with strange dark eyes.

"That Snape child," they told their children. "I don't want to see you near."

But then, they never had to worry about that. He'd developed a reptutation by the age of ten. Some said he was a banshee child, come in from the waters or the moors.

At first, Tobias didn't know Lily existed - but he was soon to find out.

Severus lay along a branch in the tree near the creek. His heart sped up as she slipped through the low-hanging prine branches and looked around the shadowy clearing. Hide and seek - they were both professionals, but she'd been looking for him too long now, and his hands were cold. He only saw her evenings these days - school keeping her away. It smelled like rain, the air was hot and damp and deadened sound.

He slipped down like a ghost behind her, sliding from one branch to the next until he dropped to the ground like a cat. He caught both her wrists from behind and she shrieked and spun around.

Laughing in realisation as the fear faded and pumping adrenaline, she shot away from him, through the field alongside the road, and he chased her. She never ever could run as fast as he could. At ten, his father had already hit him much more than once. He never could avoid that temper, but he learned quickly how to avoid those hands.

He caught her again and they tumbled into the grass in a heap.

Thunder rolled in the distance and he had her pinned, and she was laughing up at him, both of them catching their breath when-

"Severus!"

They scrambled to their feet. His father stood there, the side of the road.

He stared at them both for a long time.

"It's going to rain. Come on home now."

Severus glanced back at Lily who was looking at him in concern. There was a tension now that had nothing to do with the approaching storm.

"Severus."

"Yeah," the boy said, and climbed from the field to the road, where his father slid a hand over his black hair, down his neck and round his shoulder, and led him away.

They didn't speak until they were out of earshot.

"Is that the girl your mother talks about?"

He felt a hot slash of betrayal. Tobias wasn't supposed to know. She wasn't supposed to tell.

"Yes."

"Hm."

Hogwarts was not eveything he wanted it to be, even when it was. Hogwarts was freedom and potions and books, and it was Lily every day, but it was also Potter and Black, and it was also sneers and jeers. He learned very quickly that their Northern Lancashire accent was laughed at.

He and Lily adopted the London sound unnaturally quickly. They giggled about it and made fun of it together, in private, but by the end of their first year, most everyone had forgot that they were the two Lanky kids.

When he returned home, he heard the difference in his own voice, and his mother frowned at it. His father hit him and snapped "What is that?" before stalking out of the house.

He didn't speak to him for days.

There never was a time when Severus realised he loved Lily Evans. That he _wanted_ her, because hadn't it always been that way? There was only the discovery of her face in his mind when he touched himself, and the inability to breathe when she wrapped her arms around him, and it was Hogwarts and summers and Lily, Lily, Lily and Lily in her big winter coat, and Lily furious when he won the points in Potions class, and Lily with that horrible sunburn, and they were thirteen and she produced a bottle of vodka - clear as water and they drank it - not much because it tasted awful and there was nothing to drink it with, but they were warm and happy and laughing at nothing and talking about everything and…

He kissed her, then, under that willow tree, in the shadows of a July evening and she kissed him back.

And then she said, "Ah. Oh," all breathless and pulled away. She laughed then, and shoved him lightly on the shoulder and said, "Let's go for a walk," and they did, but they didn't speak about it again.

"I don't want you spending so much time with that girl." Tobias said.

"Why not?"

Tobias narrowed his eyes at his son. He saw the way he watched Lily leave when she walked him home, and he heard the way he said her name. He saw the way she laughed and threw her arms about him, innocent to it all.

She had no idea, really.

"You'll mind me, Severus.

Fourteen, and she was so beautiful today he could barely look at her. Eileen was visiting her aunt and Tobias was at work and she walked home with him and they sat on his bedroom floor because it was strange to sit on the bed, only neither admitted it, and drank cups of tea.

When she kissed him he dropped his cup and lukewarm water spread out over the wooden boards to cool there, forgotten.

When they stood and she undid her cardigan in front of him (and her body was covered in freckles - he'd wondered if it would be) it wasn't strange, it was just breathtakingly fragile.

They both knew it. They didn't speak.

When he sat on the bed and she stradled his thighs and pulled away from the kiss when she felt him, how hard he was, he knew it wasn't over. She rested her cheek next to his ear an they just held onto each other and breathed and then she moved and his head tipped back and he whispered some nonsense.

And when the front door opened and shut they didn't hear it, and she lay back, in just her bra and summer shorts and he held himself over her by his arms, but he could _feel_ the heat between her thighs, and she pressed her hand to his lower belly where it was so, so warm.

And when she undid his belt, and his trousers, refraining from commenting on the state of his pants, they didn't hear Tobias on the stairs, and when she whispered "Kiss me again," they didn't see his shadow in the doorway.

He wrenched Severus off her and threw him against the wall. "No!" he shouted "Not in this house!"

Lily wasn't stupid, and she wasn't slow. She was into her cardigan, fingers flying over the buttons before Tobias rounded on her.

"What do you think you're doing?" he roared at her. "You're a child! Get out of my house! Don't let me see your face again!" And ah, yes, Tobias knew… just eighteen, he'd been, and a baby on the way.

With one look at Severus, she was gone.

Good, he thought, she was safe.

Tobias wrenched Severus to his feet, grabbed him by the throat and hissed "Smarten up."

And then he was gone, slamming the front door behind him.

When he could breathe again, he stood at the window and made sure his father headed to the pub, and not to Lily's house.

She never came over again. He didn't ask her.

She just whispered "I'm sorry," the next day, when he showed up at her house. She gave him a brief, sad smile then shut the door quietly, and then he didn't see her for the rest of the summer.

Or the next.

Or the next.

Or any summer after that.


End file.
